Japanese transition - Interior Design

Architectural Review, The, Oct, 1996 by Penny McGuire

In a pleasant residential suburb of Melbourne, a new house for a Japanese family takes advantage of local circumstances while expressing the ideas of transition and confluence.

John Wardle's house for the Kitamura family is in Kew, an agreeably leafy suburb of Melbourne. The Kitamuras emigrated from Japan to Australia at the beginning of the '80s, and in commissioning a new house, they asked for a building that could accommodate habits born out of their own culture, but which have adapted to the experience of settling in Australia, and to this spacious rus in suburbes.

There was no attempt on the part of either the clients or the architect to import obvious icons of Japanese tradition, like the shoji screen or tatami mat, or to establish scale and proportion by reference to them; but still the house is replete with Japanese resonances. They are present in the delicate layering and flow of space, in the subtle indications-by a change in material or level-of spatial divisions and functions, and in the gradations of exterior spaces, passing from formal to less formal as you move away from the building. Woven through the design of this house are the twin themes of transition and confluence.

The house is made up of two pavilions linked to form an L, the long arm being aligned with a central axis running east-west down the length of the narrow site. The principal orientations are therefore on the north (sunny side) and south. The site slopes from east to west, and from north to south; and Wardle has exploited the natural gradients so that while the building is simple on plan, its sections in both directions under a constant roof line are stepped and complex.

The main pavilion on two levels steps down the site along the principal axis to a paved courtyard and green lawn bounded by trees. It contains the kitchen and family room underneath bedrooms, study and bathroom. Galvanised steel portals hold the first floor mass clear of the completely glazed lower levels, accommodating a screen of retractable louvres on the north side. Floor surfaces change as the level changes, from the hardwood decking of an entrance bridge, to the Victorian ash and marble in the hall, to polished concrete tiles in the kitchen and back to the warmth of ash once again in the family room. The emphatic linearity of the building is interrupted at two points by vertical shafts over the stairs: one over the ones that descend to the lower ground level is a source of light, the other over those to the upper floor from the luminous entrance has been made, in contrast, a dark transition.

By being set on a concrete podium, the smaller single-storey pavilion is maintained at ground floor level giving on to a lawn on the east, and an enclosed terrace on the west. This drops down to the paved court, and so to the west lawn. The pavilion encompasses the entrance hall and a single volume - a formal living room of great simplicity and dignity. Continuous horizontal glazing beneath a sheer wall on the west, and a wood and steel screen suspended externally on the east, are designed to allow views outside only when seated Japanese style on the polished wooden floor. Overhead, the ceiling rises to a height of six metres, its inverted form adding a sculptural dimension.